In the second paragraph of this week’s feature on Samuel Stephon Curry, a young man who was shot to death by an off-duty cop who caught him in the act of robbing another man at gunpoint, Angela Valdez writes:

A procession of teenage girls walked into the peaked wooden chapel, tottering on red spike heels and clutching each other’s hands. They began to cry loudly when they reached the casket. One girl could be heard above the rest. Her high voice whined and cracked. She wailed like the mother of a child killed in a faraway war zone. But Trina, the dead man’s cousin, is just 16. She wore a commemorative RIP T-shirt and low-rise, cropped khaki Dickies. Turning away, she covered her eyes. “I can’t see it. I can’t go,” she said, and stumbled out of the room.

The public, of course, is cold to Curry’s death. The corpse in the funeral described by Valdez is that of a man who in actuality was a violent criminal. Curry’s end turned out to be one of those splendid moments when the swift service of justice saves the society the heavy expense of court dates and jail time. The family, however, lost one of their own and that is all that matters to it. What this shows, and I think why Plato in the Republic advocated the destruction of the family structure and family feeling, is that the the institution of immediate relations is at root amoral. Some political scientists, in reference to the substance of mafia bonds, call it “amoral familism.” Curry could have been killed while in the process of raping and murdering someone, and still his family would have accepted his corpse and buried it with love. The family, as we see in Antigone, is not the site of human laws (reason, nomos) but human mysteries. It is bound by and with the cosmic.

But does the amoral nature of the family not make it a bad standard for society—an association of mostly unrelated people? Mustn’t we do our best to break the family up and reformulate all relationships on the communal terms of the Republic? Isn’t it dangerous to expose the development of a child to the lawless unity of the family? Yes and no. Family feeling is bad; social feeling is good. But as Spinoza pointed out in his late political writings, social feeling, the feeling for unrelated others, extends from the feeling of kind, the family feeling—the natural feeling of love for those who look and act like you. In short, the love of yourself. (Family love is nothing more than self-love.) From family love we grow social love. One is from birth; the other is from instruction. The tendency must already be there if it is to be socialized.

An example directly from experience: Last week an old woman was sitting across from me on the bus. Her stop arrived, she stood as the bus slowed down. But when the bus came to a full stop, there was jolt that knocked the old woman backward. I suddenly feared her life and without a thought raised my hand and caught her fall. I restored her to her feet. She thanked me for her life. But why was I so quick to catch her, this old woman who had nothing to do with me and my well-being? Because the same fall a few years ago hurt my mother and revealed a cancer in her spine that was ultimately to kill her. My mother spent the last year of her life suffering the pain of that bus fall. From immediate connections we develop connections that are not immediate.

The feeling that was expressed at the funeral for Curry, a feeling that finds its force in the mysteries of life and death, is the feeling that needs to be transformed into the force of the law. A society must represent the highest development of love.